(What had happened to the way she used to come as soon as I entered her and the nights I watched her face as she slept?)
and I could make Robby love me.
I had dreamed of something so different from what reality was now offering up, but that dream had been a blind man’s vision. That dream was a miracle. The morning was fading. And I remembered yet again that I was a tourist here.
(Though I didn’t know this on November fourth, that morning would be the last time I ever saw my family together again.)
And then—as if it was preordained—all of these thoughts triggered something. An invisible force pushed me toward a destination.
I could actually feel this happening to me physically.
A small implosion occurred.
I was staring at the crow circling above me and in that instant I suddenly realized something.
There were attachments.
Where?
There were attachments on the e-mails coming from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks.
My chest started aching and I could barely sit still but I waited in that chair on the deck until my family disappeared from the kitchen and I heard the Range Rover pull out of the driveway, and the moment the automated timers activated the sprinklers on the front lawn I hurried into the house.
I nodded to Rosa, who was cleaning the kitchen as I rushed past her, and then I bumped into Marta outside my office—the specifics of the conversation I can’t remember; the only important information was Jayne’s departure for Toronto the next day—and I just nodded at everything Marta said, wrapping the blanket tighter around myself, and then I was in my office, locking the door, dropping the blanket, fumbling with the computer, propping myself in the swivel chair. I could see my reflection in the computer’s black screen. Then I turned it on and my image was erased. I logged on to AOL.
“You’ve got mail,” the metallic voice warned me.
There were seventy-four e-mails.
On each of the seventy-four e-mails that had arrived the night before—the flurry of them materializing the moment I’d been making my connections—there was an attachment.
When I backtracked to the first e-mail—which had arrived on October third, my father’s birthday—there was an attachment on that one as well.
I had never noticed these before, paying attention only to the blank pages that arrived nightly at 2:40 a.m., but now there was something to download.
I started with the first one that arrived on October third.
On the screen: 03/10. My e-mail address. And the subject: (none).
My right hand was shaking when I clicked on Read. I grabbed my wrist with the left hand to control it.
A blank page.
But a video document was attached, labeled “no subject.”
I pressed Download.
A window appeared and asked, “Do you wish to download this file?”
(Wish—what a strange verb choice, I thought idly.)
I pressed Yes.
File name: “no subject.”
I pressed Save.
“The file has been downloaded,” the metallic voice promised.
And then I clicked on Open File.
I breathed in.
The screen went black.
And then a picture slowly emerged onto the screen, revealing itself as a video.
The video focused on a house. It was night and fog had rolled in and was curling around the house but its rooms were brightly lit—in fact the lights seemed too bright; it was as if the lights were meant to ward off loneliness. The house was a modern two-story structure in what looked like an upscale neighborhood. The houses on either side of this one were identical, and the image seemed both familiar and anonymous. The camera was filming this from across the street. My eyes locked on the silver Ferrari parked crookedly in front of the garage, its front wheels resting on the dark lawn that sloped down from the house. And I realized, with a sick amazement, that this was the house my father had moved to in Newport Beach after my parents divorced. I cried out and then clamped a hand over my mouth when I saw him through the large bay window, sitting in his living room, wearing a white T-shirt and the red, flower-patterned shorts he’d bought at the Mauna Kea Hotel in Hawaii.
A car drove by silently on Claudius Street, its headlights breaking through the fog, and after it passed, the camera started gliding up the granite pathway toward my father’s house, agile yet unhurried, its movement cold and inscrutable.
I could hear the waves of the Pacific crashing and foaming against the shore, and from somewhere else the yapping of a small dog.
The camera carefully honed in through the large pane of glass to where my father sat hunched over in an armchair, surrounded by the polished wood and mirrors of the living room. And there was music—a song I recognized, “The Sunny Side of the Street,” playing inside the house. It had been my grandmother’s favorite song and the fact that the song meant anything to my father surprised and touched me, and this pushed away the terror for a moment. But the terror returned instantly when I realized that my father had no idea this video was being shot.